Chess Games
by Milli Moi
Summary: Life is like a game of chess, there are multiple ways to play and multiple ways to win. This is the world Natasha Romanoff knows, this is her playground. As a newly-minted SHIELD agent, her actions are questionable but her skill is undeniable.


Natasha observed the room from her position, a few steps up on the old grand staircase leading down to the function room. She watched the dance of waiters, like magnets repulsed by every well-dressed person not in uniform as they carried gold-coloured trays with no more than four champagne flutes. Too many glasses seemed rushed, seemed unsophisticated. Her eyes flicked to another section of the room. A scattering of round tables donned with white table cloths and topped with a carefully groomed glass vase of wildflowers on each. They were identical, all set to a uniformity similar to the waiters. She saw the edge of a table cloth lift on the table nearest to her and a young boy with an unruly mop of blonde hair came crawling out. He looked over his shoulder, waiting to be pursued by a friend. The kid was dressed in most of a three-piece suit in a blue-tinged Harris Tweed - having left the suit jacket slung over the back of a chair further up the room. He was at that odd stage, around ten years old she presumed, the stage where boys seemed tall and thin, beginning to grow into men but their bodies still giving the impression of childhood.

A third glance, this one out of the side of her eye where thick mascara almost obscured her vision. She took in the long wooden bar, across the room from the clustered tables. The bar itself was long and made of strong wood, well polished. It had a wooden replica anchor hung on the far wall in a break between the shelves housing numerous bottles of alcohol. There were several bartenders, mostly men but Natasha managed to pick two girls from the mix. One short-haired, the other with hair in a high and tidy ponytail. Along the front, the older gentlemen -those likely in their fifties or early sixties - either half perched on a bar stool or stood at the bar nursing drinks in both bottles and glasses. Third from the left, he was where he should be, where she needed him to be. The short-haired woman served him another bottle, he barely acknowledged her and carried on laughing with his friends. Jerk.

A large clock face was to her far side, overlooking the staircase. It was one of those designed to look like a pocket watch but much larger. 9:42 pm. She noted it as always, she noted every detail, it was part of the job and of the world, she lived in. Natasha had a quick glance down, gently pulling at the area where her evening gown cinched at the waist, making sure a suitable amount of her physical assets were on show, before descending the last three stops and flowing straight into character.

It had taken the older man several minutes, give him his due before he approached Natasha. She had situated herself at the end of the bar, legs crossed so the slit in her dress showed as much of her thigh as was decent. It was high enough that the lacy edge of the garters she wore were almost visible. He reminded her of the perfect stereotype businessman. He wasn't tall, maybe pushing six foot when he stood straight, there was a fuzzy patch on the crown of his head which had begun to thin out. This patch looked like a halo which spread out to heavily peppered dark brown hair at the edges of the receding borders. He was large, a definite beer belly sticking out in front of him even if the suit he wore had clearly been tailored to fit at its best. It was clear he had a few drinks in him given his tie had been loosened and hung noose-like around his neck, the top two buttons of a white collared shirt were also undone. His suit jacket, which had been somewhere between a black and a midnight blue - likely an attempt to look younger, flexible, able to move with the times - had been discarded somewhere and only the pants, with a simple silver-buckled belt, and a pair of dark dress shoes remained of his attire. The expected beer glass was held in one hand as he gave longer and longer glances at her down the length of the bar but he abandoned it as he straightened himself up to walk in her direction. She remembered years back when in training that she had been taught to count her eye contact. To show a person you are interested you want to hold contact for a little longer than normal, but you also want to be the first to look away. Desperation is not something to be conveyed when luring in a victim. Now, that four to five-second count was natural, she didn't need to count the elephants any more before she knew to glance away, focusing on the cocktail glass which short-haired had just placed in front of her next to a white paper napkin. Natasha concentrated on the plastic stirring stick, taking it between two fingers and rolling it a little, stirring the red to orange colours within each other. She glanced back to the man she sought through the corner of her eye, his image blurred by her mascara. Following the guidance of the polished wood towards her she couldn't help but make the association of a sailor walking the plank.

* * *

He stared at her, his old grey eyes showing more life than they likely had in years. More life even than they had shown when she straddled his body, teasing him with the gentle scratching of her nails on his bare chest. This man had lost so much feeling, lost so much emotion that even when a woman who he believed to be at least twenty five years his junior was taking control of his body in a hotel room, making all the right fake sounds of appreciation while he attempted to love her, not even then could he show any spark.

Now, as she wrapped the white bathrobe courtesy of the hotel en suite around herself, Natasha saw a little energy in the man who might have been waking up to the world he meddled in. Feeling kind, and not being particularly fond of dealing with wine stains, Natasha plucked the wine glass he still held out of his hand by the stem and placed it on the bedside table next to an obnoxiously shaped lamp.

His hand was clutching his left shoulder, fingers running frantically across his bare skin as though he expected his touch may help the feeling in his chest. Natasha took in once more the plain gold wedding band he wore on the wrong hand, she felt for his wife - an innocent without the brains or gumption to act alone. Natasha slid herself to the edge of the bed, sitting watching Mr Carlson as his breathing became erratic. She had seen this chemical agent in action before so knew his behaviour was more likely due to panic than the effects from touching his lips to the coated rim of the wine glass.

"What, what is this, who are you?" His tone changed mid-sentence from one of fear to anger. Natasha avoided his gaze, as she searched for the small pocket sewn into her bra just under the strap meeting those grey eyes once more with a tiny bag containing a round white pill and a very small vial, between her finger and thumb.

"This? You mean the reaction you are beginning to have?"

This time she met his eyes for the same four and a half seconds from earlier in the evening. Now it was intimidating, now he knew he was overpowered by a woman, something a man like Carlson feared most of all.

"These effects," Natasha began after a brief pause,

"Are the result of VX, a chemical we invented at a time you probably remember well after all your career began around the 1960s did they not? Working with your Father, earning the odd bit of pocket money for yourself. Was that when you developed your love for money?"

"What's VX, What's this garbage, who are you?"

Again with the who are you, he cared about that for some reason although it wasn't an uncommon reaction from those she was sent to eradicate. It was as though they thought they stood a chance to get through it all, to go home with a name for their government. Men like him never stopped going crying to Mommy.

Natasha stood, walking across the room, looking under the clothes neatly folded on a chair in the corner of the room, rummaging through the zipped pocket of an abandoned open suitcase on the floor.

"What the bloody hell are you doing? What have you done?"

He was slowly upping the anger, his face and ears turning red like that of a cartoon character. His fingers crawled from his chest to his throat, roughly clearing it but finding that his instincts did nothing.

"Oh, I'm looking for your papers, sir, the papers I know have been entrusted to you from Jared Wang. You know, those papers to get your cargo from the country." She stopped searching, they weren't there- that was obvious to most - the papers were unlikely to be physical and even if they were they would not be in the same location as the head of the organisation.

No, it was all an act, like the spider of her namesake she enjoyed toying with her prey, hoping it would break before she got her hands dirty. It wasn't easy to get blood out of evening gowns like this and she needed their resale value.

"You see, sir, the chemical agent in your system is slowly shutting off all neurotransmission, causing your muscles to fail before it will eventually cause your diaphragm to stop and you to asphyxiate. I would prefer to have the intel I need before you succumb to your fate. If you cooperate, well-,"

Natasha reaches back into her bra pocket, once more holding up the small bag of medications to show Carlson.

"These here, the white one is atropine and the other, the little vial there, that is pralidoxime. I've also got a nice, clean hypodermic to administer the pralidoxime. These guys, they are your reward, you give me what I need and you get them, you don't and you get a nice cool drawer in the morgue all to yourself."

Carlson rolled his eyes, pretending not to notice the huffing sound his breathing was taking.

She almost felt sorry for him, the guy was acting brave, shrugging his metaphoric shoulders and making out he did not care. She saw the water in his eyes, she saw the sweat forming on his skin. He wasn't a good lier and neither was his body.

"You new to this, huh?" He gasped out, facing the stupid lamp for a moment before meeting her eyes with a demonic grin.

"You're just a kid, thinking you can play the long game, yeah? Your not the first kid CIA's sent for me. Even had a Brit chase me down. I know how this works, all this psychosomatic shit."

"You know how it works?" Natasha dropped her shoulders, rocking them forward and turning the switch to vulnerable. She walked across to the bed, crossing the path of her feet as she went. He knew the sexy was fake, but that didn't stop the old pervert from watching her boobs bounce in the balcony bra cups a little as she climbed onto the foot of the bed, crawling her way back across the white duvet and kicking aside a blue strip of silky comforter so it melted to a pile on the floor.

This time eye contact is low, keep looking down, looking to the door, only giving him a second of contact at most. She gently took his hand from the base of his neck, pulling it down and closer to herself.

"You think I'm that bad, you saw through it all?" Natasha played with his fingers, slipping her hand over them softly till she met the middle finger. She smiled at the middle-aged man and pulled, hearing both the crunch as she broke the finger from the knuckle joint and the scream of the old businessman as she slowly bent his finger towards the top of his hand.

His jaw clenched, eyes squeezing so his face formed a tight grimace. Natasha lent closer, her lip scraping his ear lobe as she whispered.

"Time to learn how it really goes down. I can pull each digit from their joint, increasing your pain one by one. I'm no naive little girl Carlson, I want answers. You can choose to die, you're disposable - the intel is all I need."

She let go of his finger, rising up to a sitting position once more. The digit sat awkwardly on his hand, the blood rushing back but it remained unresponsive. Carlson's face and finger matched in tone, pale pink with flushed spots of red.

Natasha reached to his neck, watching the man tense, expecting pain as her fingers made contact. Instead, she checked his pulse. He was fading but there was plenty of time. She had told him the truth, he was disposable, but that left a mess and those faceless operators high above her, they didn't like a mess. Bodies were untidy, bodies of known figures could lead to a lot of overtime for the cover-ups.

She had to admit a part of her was impressed, he hadn't cracked quite as quickly as she expected but something about that annoyed her, possibly the fact he didn't seem to know what he was up against. Still, he was treating women as lesser, but she hadn't exactly expected a little torture to uncover Mother Teresa. It was as though he thought she wouldn't actually go through with it, that she would torture him to the point of losing consciousness and then give him the life-saving drugs. He clearly knew nothing about Russian operators, about Russian agents, he didn't know what it was to kill fellow classmates, to commit arson in a high school, to know the secrets behind Kennedy's assassination.

She considered what a man like Carlson would know of Espionage, yes he knew how to break laws - she'd done the reading, knew he had trained under his father in the business of exporting kidnapped women as free labour - but he was used to comfortable protection. He was used to being wrapped in cotton wool and being too high to reach when things went down. The men on the ground, the ones too scared of him to run even when his business turned less about free labour and more about free sex, those were the ones who paid the price. Pawns in his endless chess game where foot soldiers kept him comfortably away from reality.

"But there's a problem in your sources, Miss Ford, I am not what you think, I don't have the intel. I don't have anything you-."

He cut himself off with a blood-curdling scream. The pistol had been sitting at the back of the old boxy tv screen. Natasha took the safety off when she set up the room hours before. The round in the magazine had been intended for unwelcome guests but he had a lesson to learn. In three short steps, a game of chess could be won by taking out the queen; Natasha did it in two.

From the moment the bullet pierced the top of his ankle joint the blood began to spurt, pulsing from the artery in rhythm with his heartbeat. Blood began to pool on the cream carpet, as the puddle widened the edges began to thicken and congeal as the blood clot. Carlson stared, the colour visibly draining from his face and his pupils dilating. His mouth remained open, panting and terrified but unable to move, unable to take his eyes from the woman in front of him. Natasha crossed the room in another two steps, resting the barrel of the Glock semi-auto against his left temple. She could see the tacky nature of his skin, now he was scared; now he was where she needed him to be.

Natasha bent over, keeping the barrel pressed to his head and her trigger finger at the ready, she moved closer, seeing the older man begin to vibrate a little, trying to hide the fact he shook with fear. She moved closer until her painted lips almost brushed his cheek before she spoke in a calm, collected hiss.

"я черная вдова, и я больше мужины чем вы когда–либо будете."

Natasha paused, giving Carlson a moment to hear the words, even though they were a language he could neither understand or identify. She knew they raised the fear he felt, made him feel intimidated and alienated from her. The silence hung thick, only his breathing and the faint sound of music played in the bar two floors below filled the air.

"Give me the codes." Natasha butted the metal pistol against the side of his face hard, giving him a last jolt even though she knew it wasn't needed. She had him.

The six digits burst from his lips as if they surrendered themselves without his permission. Six digits were all it needed, it sounded simple, but those digits were enough for Natasha to infiltrate the workplace as Donna Gregory, a secretary, who would take a walk on her lunch break, grab the records and be gone. That paper held the lives of one hundred and seventeen young women ageing between fourteen and twenty-eight, it was the key that would find them and send them home safe. Safe from a life of hard work, physical attacks and rape.

He knew what he did, he ignored it. Carlson thought of the bigger, more corrupt nest of snakes above him rather than the innocents under him. That reminded her of someone, made her feel emotions she could no longer really name because naming them made them exist and their existence would end hers.

She felt some form of relief as she straightened her body to full height, the breath she released into the warm air of the hotel suite was one of a job finished, but there was something else in it, something she wasn't quite ready to name incase she scared it back into the shadows. Natasha didn't look back as she headed for the door. She knew the man she left behind would live, even if part of her still wanted to rectify that fact. She also knew that the shot to his ankle had burrowed into the lateral malleolus where the foot joined to the fibula bone in the lower leg meaning he may have reduced function of the ankle or at the very least would go through a lot of pain as he healed. The pulsing blood showed an artery had been nicked, perhaps he would even lose the foot if blood flow became an issue.

Momentarily forgetting the drugs that would perhaps save him from further damage at the hands of the VX, Natasha turned on her heel to face her victim for the last time. He had slumped after she moved, beginning to lose control of his upper body under the influence of the drug. His hands were clumsily mashing at the screen of an iPhone. Natasha heard the dialling tone.

She raised the Glock once more, extending her arm and taking the shot with only a moment's glance through the crosshairs. One, two, three, four bullets hit the wall above the bed frame, plaster fracturing and falling around the nearly broken man. The rabbit in the headlights look once more came on his face, before a count of five he slumped, his whole body dropping heavily to the floor, overbalancing as he fainted.

Natasha smirked, tucking the Glock into one of the black garters she still wore and throwing the small bag of medications onto the bed. If he died it would be of his own pride.

"Coulson: codes secure. And the asshole who gave me them has been neutralised."

Natasha had barely finished speaking into the clear earpiece she wore before meeting a team at the door. She sashayed between the men and women in S.H.I.E.L.D. jackets and bulletproof vests, barely dodging out the way of a medic following after them. At the end of the buzz of agents, she was met by a long brown jacket over her shoulders.

"Thanks, Coulson, not really my colour though,"

The older agents gave was shifty, trying not to make full contact until he had confirmed she was wearing something even if it wasn't enough to equate decent clothing. He turned to face her properly as Natasha tied the fabric belt around her waist, now only bare legs and heels could be seen of the night's sins.

The agent was agitated. Natasha watched as he cupped his chin, then created a fist against his nose and finishing with a palm to the forehead before he gave up dropping his hands into the pockets of black suit trousers. No wonder everyone thought the intelligence agency was just like that British film, Coulson certainly dressed like it although she was pretty sure he didn't go around parading his license to kill in front of women.

"Do we need to have that talk again Agent? It would be nice if I could go back to the Director with a nice clean report and minimal paperwork but I have a feeling that won't happen." He sighed heavily, his shoulders slouching a little as he slipped from 'Boss, Agent Coulson' to 'Phil Coulson' - a fellow agent who might, although he could never admit it, be a little bit frightened of Natasha.

"Do I want to go in there, Romanoff? Don't think I really want to see your handiwork. I witnessed it before you were one of us, and I'm not quite ready to be responsible for that mess."

As he spoke he spotted the blood spattered across Natasha's arms and winced slightly as he handed her a small pack of wet wipes from her suit pocket.

"Don't go in then, I have my methods and you have yours. All you should take away is the lives of those women. Phase one is complete, Phase two - find the records - is now in operation."

Natasha began to walk down the hallway towards the elevators. Two armed agents were on either side of the doors, holding themselves and their automatic rifles with such poise they were almost statue-like. She could tell the agent behind her, the one who was supposed to be her boss was torn. He wasn't used to seeing a crime scene like the one she left behind and then sitting with the criminal at a morning de-brief watching her pour coffee. It was new, she was new and there was a lot they could learn from her. If they wanted to keep their plates polished clean then by all means, but she didn't mind chipping the edges of the good china if it meant a better meal. She was an asset, Fury knew that when he agreed to take her on, but maybe not an asset they were ready to accept.

"Alright Coulson, I'm in a good mood," She called back down the hall without turning,

"You need to write your report. Violation of the 1994 United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Violation of Title 18, section 2340. Violation of Section 11.406 part A, one through three."

Natasha could visualise the head of her boss dropping lower and lower in despair.

"Well, at least you're doing your homework," he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear before she reached the guarded elevator. She smiled to herself thinking of the agent squirming uncomfortably before she even said her last violation out loud.

" Oh, and since we're in New York, one last one Phil, Section 230. Have a good evening!"

With that, she stepped into the opening Elevator with one of the minders on her heels. They would escort her back to the triskelion for a quick debrief before she could go back to her boring little apartment, have a warm shower and collapse in front of the TV with whatever pack of cookies she could find in the cupboard. Yeah, she thought watching the button labelled two fade and the light begin to shine on the number one, she could get used to all this. It was unusual to have a guy in bulletproof garb accompanying her without the use of handcuffs, it was strange to have a warm jacket handed to her meaning she didn't have to break into the maid's lockers and steal something to get herself home.

It was almost like they cared, like she was rising from the position of pawn quickly up the ranks, maybe one day - if she was lucky, and if she survived that long - she would be Queen.


End file.
